


Ghosts

by AlterEgon



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Gen, Ghosts of the Past - Freeform, Memories, trick - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 14:44:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21163358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterEgon/pseuds/AlterEgon
Summary: On a dark night, shortly before her departure on her last journey, Delenn finds herself alone with the ghosts of her past.





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacewitchescantdie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacewitchescantdie/gifts).

> Dear spacewitchescantdie,  
Here's your gift for this exchange!  
I hope you enjoy it!

One would have thought, she mused, that after all the time she had spent in space, with only a thin hull between her and the eternal blackness sprinkled with a few small specks of light here and there, she'd find nothing extraordinary about a dark sky.

And yet, standing outside on a stormy night was an experience entirely different from staring through the windows of a spaceship.

The stars were never concealed by towering clouds in space, invisible in the darkness but blotting out what little light there might have been in a different season. If there was any wind pulling on your hair or clothes while on a spaceship or station, then there was something very seriously wrong with the environmental controls.

Space was a silent affair.

Nights on a planet were not – even if you had retreated from public life, or most company for that matter, to live in chosen solitude, admitting only a few trusted friends.

Staring into the darkness, she focused on the sound of the wind, and the rustling of trees that seemed much too close and yet infinitely far away from where she stood. It wasn't raining, not yet.

A strand of her hair was tugged free by another gust of wind.

The motion of pushing it back where it belonged had become natural in the decades since her change. When she'd first made the decision to go through with her transformation, she hadn't known exactly what to expect. The journey had been painful, and frightening. Though ultimately, she told herself, it had been worth it.

She didn't like to think back to the horrors of those early weeks and months, when everything about the body she lived in had seemed so foreign and wrong.

She'd gone from being constantly reminded of her differences to nearly forgetting about them, not giving a thought to her otherness for days, then weeks, then months at a time.

It was good.

She was now as she had been destined to become. It was right. This was what she was supposed to be. How she was supposed to be.

Why, then, was it getting harder recently to ignore that she was not truly Minbari anymore? Why did she wake in the middle of the night, filled with a sudden terror of what she had become, and what it would still mean for her? Those were the moments when all the times came back to her when she'd been rejected by both her old people and her new. A freak, an abomination, they had called her.

Sometimes she'd wondered if they were right.

She wondered that now, too.

Maybe it was because it was getting all too clear that there was more to the change than even she had ever expected. No Minbari had lived to the age she had. No human had. Yet for all that she could tell, she wasn't even close to death.

The longer she thought about it, the harder it became to deny.

She was no longer Minbari.

She wasn't quite human.

There was no true place for her on either world. The need for her to be involved in politics and public life had long since ceased. Her husband was long gone. She had outlived their son.

Increasingly she felt that there was nothing left for her in this world at all.

Never one to deal well with being useless, she had set about preparing for a new journey, a mission to give her purpose. Soon, she would depart, flying far into that darkness that had been her home for many years. She didn't think she was going to return from it.

For now, she stood and stared into the night, held in place by the darkness as if it was a vice closing on her, keeping her from moving.

She came outside early every morning, to watch the sun rise on the horizon. Those were peaceful moments.

This was different.

Then, she had no difficulty at all conjuring up the image of her husband, even after all these years. Now, he seemed as far from her as he could ever be.

Yet, she didn't feel alone. There were voices on the wind, so low that their words were impossible to make out.

It didn't matter. She knew what they were saying. She felt their presence all around her.

She couldn't say when it had started. It had probably been around the same time that she had started to acknowledge, once again, that she was no longer quite herself. As the carefully crafted pretense had fallen away, other things had come back to her as well, once stored and locked at the back of her mind to be taken out and examined only at the appropriate moments.

Minbari souls moved on after death, to be reborn again – whether as Minbari or as human.

What about her own, she wondered, when her day finally came? Who would want her soul, that was not quite here nor there? Would she be discarded, a strange thing, a curio to be examined and marveled at, but ultimately unfit for further use?

Minbari didn't linger. Even as a child she'd never been afraid of ghosts – not in the way that some humans never ceased to be. Maybe it was another symptom of how she had changed that she could feel them around her now, crowding her, whispering in the night.

She didn't need to see them. There were hundreds of them, thousands, millions even. They were the dead of the war her vote had begun, and those of another war her people – and ultimately, she – had supported. They were people she had used, or permitted to be used.

They were everywhere, and while the brightness of a sunny day made it easier to keep them away, there was nothing standing between them and her now.

_Do you think you can escape from us?_ They asked her wordlessly as she focused her mind on her future plans. _Do you think that you can get away and leave us behind?_

Of course not. They weren't bound to any one place. They weren't even real, when at the same time they were the most real thing she knew. She carried them inside her, and she would carry them up into space with her. They were her ghosts, the demons of her mind and her memory to fight, and, somehow, find a way to either reconcile with or to vanquish.

If she was looking for the peace that she hoped her husband had found, that day that he had flown out to go to the sea, she knew she wasn't going to find it while they were lingering near.

Though she could barely see her hand, still raised to her face in the darkness, she glanced to where the docks were, where she would soon board a ship to leave the planet one last time.

Her ghost swirled around her, pulling on her with a new gust of wind.

_Yes_, they whispered in her mind. _Go. Fly away to the place where you belong. We'll be waiting for you._

Wait they would – she was certain of that. It was a promise, as much as it was a threat.

And she would follow.


End file.
